Top 220 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Cocteau
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French novelist Jean Cocteau.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.
There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Life is a horizontal fall.
Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
I am a lie who always speaks the truth.
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.
True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
Silence moves faster when it's going backward.
I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.
The only way to kill death is through photography.
One must not mistake majority for truth.
Living is a horizontal fall.
Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
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